First-person accounts of empowerment, education and change, written by the people who live them.
As a health worker I have heard them all. Here are the most common menstrual myths in our villages, and the plain facts that set girls free of them.
I was married at fifteen to a man I had never met. This is not a story about what was taken from me. It is a story about what I took back.
We have spent a decade transferring money to keep girls in school. The money helps. But I have started to believe we are funding the wrong half of the problem.
Nobody in our group had a bank account when we started. Six years later we have funded forty enterprises. Here is exactly how it worked.
Verse for the daughters who learned to whisper, and are learning, slowly, to speak.
A field diary from the back of a jeep loaded with weighing scales, iron tablets and a banner that kept blowing away.
I expected to find that the money was not there. Instead I found that the money was there, and the girls still were not getting it.
A small girl in the back row asked me what the word on the wall meant. This is the answer I wish I had given her out loud.
They had raised children, run households and survived more than I can imagine. What they had never done was read their own names.
